


Tomorrow Will Be Kinder

by bahorel



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 09:28:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2727302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bahorel/pseuds/bahorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt fill for RVB Shipping Jamboree, Winter 2014.</p>
<p>"Church/Texas, Hunger Games AU." Enough said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tomorrow Will Be Kinder

Church’s first kill was a sour and decidedly inglorious event. Afterwards, he threw up behind a bush, still clutching his knife with numb, white knuckles. His insides were emptied out but not scoured clean; acid and guilt were eating at his stomach lining. There was no time for him to fight both himself and his opponents, who had been alerted by the sound of the cannon. Church was dumb with shock, and would have stayed there leaning weak-kneed and hunchbacked against a tree until he was slaughtered if the choice had been left up to him. It wasn’t. As soon as he was done retching, Tex grabbed his arm in an iron grip and began to drag him away at double-time. Church stumbled along behind her, glancing frequently over his shoulder until he could no longer see the still-warm body of the boy he had killed just three minutes ago.

“I need to wash my hands,” he said after a while. She had released him once they were far from the killing site and he found the will to walk on his own. His filthy knife had been returned to its sheath, but he couldn’t hide his sticky palms so easily. The boy from District 9 had been so close to him that Church could smell the sleep on his breath and feel his body convulse as he drove the knife up through his ribs with a hard jerk. There was so much more resistance than he had imagined, and so much more blood.

“We can’t spare any water,” Tex replied flatly. She had killed two of them already, one at the Cornucopia and another in the woods. It didn’t seem to bother her at all. She didn’t laugh or he could see.

He waited until the blood dried on his hands, and then began to peel it off in little flakes.

 

In the shivering darkness, they pressed side-by-side for warmth. She rested her head on his chest, and he held his breath so that he wouldn’t disturb her. His lungs were beginning to hurt when the first cannon sounded and a ghost-image of the girl from District 3 appeared in the sky. All of his closely-guarded stale air left him in an unseemly rush. Tex raised her head and propped herself up on one elbow, keeping her eyes on the sky.

A few dead kids later came the boy from District 9. He was a little bit pudgy and a little bit bored, but he had held his head high for the photographer. His name was Dexter, Church remembered; he had volunteered as tribute in the place of his younger sister. It wasn’t so often you saw something like that in the lower districts.

When it was silent again, she said, “You know he would have killed you if you didn’t get him first.”

“I’m not fucking stupid.”

“Well, you’re acting like it.”

He sat up so fast he nearly got whiplash. “Okay, well, we can’t all be rotten bitches like you! Does this _look_ like the face of a cold-blooded killer to you?”

“What are you saying? That this _does?”_ She pointed to herself, spine rigid with anger. “I do what I have to do to survive, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t be alive right now.”

“I know that!” he cried. “Like I said, I’m not fucking stupid. I’m not— _blaming_ you. I’m just saying, jump off my dick! For the next few hours, we’re not running from anyone or dying of dehydration or fighting off a swarm of fresh hell beasts, okay? So just let me wallow in misery.”

She opened her mouth as if to argue, then closed it. “Suit yourself, but that means you’ve got to keep watch.” Without waiting for his reply, she laid down with her back to him and her hands pillowed under her head.

The moment the ceremonies had ended, they had been hustled off to the train station and stowed in separate rooms to wait for their families. He had seen her from across the corridor, right before his parents rushed in weeping. Hers had come as well, but she turned them away. Much later, when the swelling around his eyes and the catch in the back of his throat were gone, he asked her why. She told him that she hated goodbyes. The only things that were important enough to say at a time like that, they already knew.

When his eyelids began to droop, he shook her awake gently to sit her watch. She sat up without a word, as though she had not been sleeping at all, and looked him in the eye. “Sorry,” he whispered. She just shook her head and pulled her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. He curled up on the ground close enough that his back could touch her side and communicate heat.

 

Dawn came in a predictable fashion. They rose bleary-eyed and slack-muscled. Tex shouldered the pack she had secured from the Cornucopia in those first decisive minutes and picked up her javelin. There was nothing for them to say. All their friends were still in school back home. Had they still been there, they would have trash talked their classmates over lunch and then gone outside for a no-holds-barred soccer game. To bring up the subject of home was to invite discord once and distraction again, neither of which they could afford. And besides, nothing else seemed real besides the ground under their feet and the branches she held back for him as they passed between the trees. Once, she let one snap back in his face and laughed. That sting was real for sure, and he lunged after her and grabbed her around the waist and she shrieked with laughter and wrenched one of his fingers back until he let go. Then they gathered up their breath and lapsed into sobering silence, eyeing the foliage around them for signs of danger.

It came to them finally a little after noon. They had discovered fresh water trickling out of a rock cleft and wrestled for first drink—a fruitless fight that ended with Church soaked and flat on his back and Tex triumphant and sated. Now she was filling up her canteen while he sat on a rock in the sun and watched a seemingly innocuous bird filter through the shrubbery for nest-making materials. It was small, it was blue—and it was startled. Without any provocation, it took to the air and disappeared in the verdure. Church hopped off the rock, looking around suspiciously.

By the time they were in earshot, it was too late. He leapt out of the way, and the arrow meant for his neck buried itself in a tree instead. Tex’s canteen clattered to the ground and lay there, filling with water and emptying again, over and over. She was already leaping at their attacker, javelin poised for a heart thrust. She dropped on top of her target with lethal force as an equally lethal enemy crept up behind her.

_“Allison!”_

She was crouched over her fallen opponent, teeth bared in a grimace as she pulled her javelin out of their chest. At the sound of Church’s shout, her head jerked up, and she whirled around just in time to look her killer in the eye. A fifteen-year-old boy, all wildness and no irises. He slammed her to the ground and brought his dagger down with brutal, uncinematic quickness.

Church was less than a second too late. He interrupted the killing stroke with a desperate side tackle that sent he and his enemy tumbling across the forest floor, banging their knees and elbows on rocks and groping blindly at one another’s weak points. The dagger had gotten lost in the fight, but Church still had his knife at his belt.

He saw now that he was up against one of the Careers, a mountain of a boy from District 2. With enough warning, Tex could have defeated him; Church knew that. He also knew that he didn’t stand a chance. Still, he threw one arm up over his face to protect himself from the blows raining down on him and curled in on himself, using his free hand to fumble his belt knife loose. With a yell, he slashed upwards desperately, and to his surprise the assault ceased. The boy from District 2 had drawn back, clutching his bleeding hands. A cannon went off overhead.

_I do what I have to do to survive, and if I didn’t you wouldn’t be alive right now._

The arena was small. There was no room for guilt or pity. Still on his knees, he sprung at his enemy, shoving his face back with one hand and cutting his throat with the other. More blood on his hands. A choking noise, all surprise, and then his head dropped to his chest and his spine began to cave. It seemed so disgraceful to Church, that people’s eyes didn’t close automatically when they died.

Tex was still warm when he reached her. He gathered her up in his arms tenderly, then wiped his bruised and wet cheeks with the heel of one hand. Her contempt would have been grand if she could see him now. There were things that he would have liked to tell her, but she hated goodbyes. There were no worthy last words. He pressed his forehead to hers and swallowed a whimper. If he started now, he would never, ever stop.

A hovercraft was coming for them now, all the dead children resting so grotesquely on camera. “Wake up,” he whispered in her ear, so that the cameras could not hear. “This is your last chance, Allison. Come on, you stubborn... Come on. Before they take you away.”

Naturally, she did not respond.

 

In his last few days, Leonard Church was alone. He was not particularly strong or fast or fierce, but he was cunning and he was resilient. Sleep no longer came to him easily, and when he saw her face in the sky that first night he thought his heart had grown so large and cancerous it was breaking all his ribs in an attempt to release itself from the mortal coil.

There were only four of them left now, and all of them had been driven towards the Cornucopia for one final showdown—a battle royale, if you will; a climax to make the watchers cheer and weep. They had been circling one another warily when with fickle impatience the gamemakers had unleashed a new barking horror upon them. Church had been quick on his feet; the girl from District 1—not so much. Only the threat of a similar fate kept Church from stopping to clap his hands over his ears. He scrambled up the side of the Cornucopia, scrabbling over the cool metal in total desperation. Something tore his pant leg, and he yanked his foot up just before he lost it for good.

From his new vantage point, back-to-back with the last of the tributes and face-to-face with his true enemies, he could observe the muttations in all their vicious detail. It was the eyes that haunted him, as they were meant to. The eyes of the boys he killed, and one pitch-pelt wolf creature with big cool dark eyes waiting for him with murderous stillness.

“Allison,” he said, and leaned over the side to reach a hand down to her.


End file.
